


The Man From Nowhere

by BannedBloodOranges



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous Relationships, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gen, Open Ending, Regret, unedited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:22:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22284790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BannedBloodOranges
Summary: “I’ve made terrible mistakes,” His brother is barely holding it together. “I-I do not know who I can trust anymore.”
Relationships: Ford Pines & Stan Pines
Comments: 10
Kudos: 36





	The Man From Nowhere

**Author's Note:**

> Fic from years back I never posted (or finished.)
> 
> Non-profit fun only.

_Gravity Falls._

He doesn’t stop to gawp. There is nothing to see, out here, no sea nor spanning mountainsides, just the glare of the terrible white and the stick houses of the hick town.

Stanley Pines could die out here. Lie down on the snow and freeze to death. No fucker would miss him. Hell, he wouldn’t miss himself.

The forest isn’t much better for the weather. Thick wafts of snow cover foilage from sight and there is no green to be seen. Just the crunch of ice and water beneath his feet and the flurrying sky above him. At least he and his brother shared the same sky if nothing else. The same sky that seemed so bare and big now closes in on him and his brother. On Stanford. There are no clouds to hide that hanging grey, no curtains to close over the dim dead sun.

Good.

The light is fading as he trudges further, all sound and sight blanketed. He hates snow. Why couldn’t Ford be in Calfornia, for all he cared?

But there’s the house, triangle shapes and pine, picket fences lashed with barbed wire. Stanley halts and takes a deep breath and shoves back his hood. The dying sun creeps over his haggard face, stubble and sun damage and pockmarks.

A curtain twitches. Stanley frowns and crosses the threshold.

Ten years.

The man who greets - no, threatens - is Stanford, but if Stanford had merged with a mad professor and their mother high on coffee and prosiac. His brother is gammy, long and stilted as opposed to Stan’s brawn and burl, and his clothes hang on him, depressed, the telltale suit of the academic lost in the crumple of sleeplessness. His brother’s face - a thinner, drawn version of his own, although smoother in skin and feature - haunts with a horrid life and Stanley has seen the shadow of it in mad old men who drink to death on doorsteps and holler at anything female.

But, as typical of Stanford, even that madness has an acute intelligence to it.

The first contact they make in ten years is too much like the last. Hard hands on his chest, pushing him down, pushing him away. Only this time, Stanley is dragged close, surprised by his brother’s sudden strength, and light flashes into his pupils, making his sight shiver and warp, Ford’s mad face hovering in front like a fever dream.

“What is this?” He growls. He’d tried to make light earlier - _hello to you too, pal_ \- but this, this is too much, even for Ford’s paranoid head, and he grips Ford’s hands and pushes them down, but not away.

That is when the panic catches on Ford’s face, and he melts away quick as if Stan is carrying a kind of disease.

“It’s nothing,” He says quickly, muttering so fast through the first sentence Stanley barely has time to catch it. He disappears into the clammy shade of the house. “Come in, come in.”

Can he come in? Is he welcome? Stan takes a tentative step forward. The room that greets him is like a topsy turvy version of Ford’s half of their bedroom as children. Graphs everywhere, knick-knacks and books and tools, but with none of Ford’s methodical chaos. There is the dank stink of settled dust, of unwashed laundry and rattling machines. There, there is Ford, gathering up a red tome stuck with papers, and his back is quaking within that god awful trench, and Stan thinks if he were to strip him, there would be the butterfly wings of bone stretched beneath his skin, too wide, too prominent.

“I’ve made terrible mistakes,” His brother is barely holding it together. “I-I do not know who I can trust anymore.”

It’s an inverted compliment, that? Well, at least that is what he’ll take from it.

“Slow down, sixer.” He rumbles, the old nickname heavying the air, and Ford flinches. Stanley doesn’t care, and touches his brother’s back, feels the shiver of the muscle beneath. His mittened hand looks enormous on the narrow stretch of his brother’s shoulders. Protectiveness rolls old and new in his gut, that same worn love. “We’ll talk it through, okay?”

His brother hunches down, hugging the book to his chest, and shakes his head.

“I have something to show you,” He says, quickly. “Something you will not believe.”

“The only thing I don’t believe is that you haven’t eaten, in what, weeks?” He keeps his hand there, pressed down tight. “And you haven’t showered, and here I was, worryin’ about my smell.”

“Stanley!” Ford barks. “Stanley, I have no time for this!”

“It took me a month to get here, Ford.” It comes out like a warning. He doesn’t mean it to, but these past ten years have all been warnings, gambles, threats. Spare Sixer the sob story, but at least show him the effect. “What’s one more hour?”

“You don’t understand. There is no time…”

“I’ve got time a’plenty.” Stan wants to be difficult. Difficult, because by some twist of fate, he’s the sensible one here, and he’s going to wring it dry, even if he is genuinely worried. “And so have you.”

Stanley sees the flush of tired fury in his brother’s face, the rise of the dreaded finger and the break open of his mouth before he starts to shiver. He shivers, shivers, shivers, shaking to his bones, and the book is hugged so hard the spine creaks and splits.

Ford is sobbing. That kind of open-mouthed, teeth clenched, howling sobs, the sort Mom made after Filbrick Pines had smacked her so hard across the face the boys had heard the clatter of her earrings hitting the sink and her makeup smeared like blood across her lips to her swelling cheek.

“Sixer.” The hand slips from his back to under his armpit, for Ford is leaning back, and Stanley thinks, for one euphoric moment, it is against him, but Ford’s knees are giving out, the books and papers spill at his feet, and Stanley squares his shoulders as Ford falls. “Ford! Stanford…”

Ford slumps, his head rolled into the cradle of Stanley’s collarbone, eyelashes fluttering. Stanley clasps both of his hands around his chest, and lowers him, gentle, to the ground. Ford is so pale, his throat shifting inanely in the gap between his shirt and mussed tie, sweat shimmering feverish on his Adam's apple.

Stanley is still, Ford it in his lap. There is a greater silence than that of the snowfall. The machines whir in quiet and there is the tremble of the boiler in the basement, but there is nothing right now, but them. It is the silence of reconciliation.

Stanley removes his mittens. His calloused hand, with scars on the knuckles and blood bitten skin on his fingers, line his brother’s hair, his jaw, the unfamiliar map of a face that is his and isn’t at the same time.

The thumbs hover on his brother’s temples, and push down, easing the coil of tension on his brother’s face, and god, can he feel it, the strung cord of his brother’s body, and his lip trembles, catching on his top teeth.

Ford is freezing. Stanley removes his jacket and tucks it under him. With one arm under Ford’s knees and another beneath his chest, Stanley grits his teeth and lifts him. Ford is dense and awkward, but not heavy, not heavier then any girl Stanley had spun in his teens. Ford is completely limp, and as far as Stanley can see, sleeping.

Whatever unbelievable thing it is, it can wait.

The house is big, bigger than it first appeared, and Stan, even with the weight of his brother in his arms, pauses to look. Triangle windows, gold and red, warm looking even with the frost punching the glass. The scent of pine, leather and dust. If he had a taste for it, he’d say it was beautiful, and perfectly Ford, if not for the razor wire and the desperate mess of paper and spilt chemicals, and Stanley scans it, trying to pull forth any clue of what his brother has lived in, what he has lived through.

But everything is quiet, and peaceful, and gone is the unnatural cool, and Stanley even indulges himself enough to wonder if it was him who purged it with his awful mundanity. A drifter from the outside world, the world of gangs and cons and failed car sleepovers. Nothing like a shaft of good ol’ fashioned poverty and violence to drive away any supernatural fancies.

If it is supernatural.

He finds - what he assumes, at least - is Ford’s room. Beneath the golden window, there is a loveseat, long and wide enough to accommodate a body. Stanley lies him down, removes his glasses and the threadbare coat. Ford moans in his sleep, but allows himself to be rearranged. There are blankets folded in a half-open drawer and Stanley covers him, laying his jacket over the top. Stanley, his bones heavy, sits down at the end of the seat, watching Ford's rising chest.

It isn’t as if nothing has changed - so much has, so much will - but for the moment, he can pretend things have returned to the way they were, if only for tonight.

* * *

Stanford’s watch is beeping; 4:48.

Stanley opens his aching eyes. It is still dark, and the temperature has dropped considerably. Ford is still wrapped up and sleeping, although his breath curls out into the air, visible in the chill.

Swearing, Stanley gets up. He is bare in his stained t-shirt and burnt out trucker pants, and god, _god_ is he cold. He eyes the thick padding of his duffel jacket, still lain across Ford, who has turned in his sleep and pulled it up over his head.

Great.

Stanley, silent, fetches a spare blanket and drapes it over his shoulders. There is no central heating in the place, but an old boiler stuck in the corner looks promising, and he remembers seeing a stockpile of Timberwood kept dry under plastic sheets by the door. He pads back and forth, hauling more wood then he can actually carry, grunting with the weight and soon the boiler is crackling alive with heat, and Ford, still buried, sighs and turns again, this time toward it, toward Stanley.

The light plays strange on his brother’s face. Even with the swollen bags beneath his eyes, his brother looks young. Younger than him, in fact, fifteen minutes or no fifteen minutes. His hair is puffed by sweat and stuck to his forehead.

“Stanley…” He moans, shifting under the blankets. Digits grip the jacket and pull it in closer.

“I’m here, Sixer.” Stanley sits opposite, by the boiler, his hands on his knees. “It’s okay, Sixer. It’s gonna be okay.”

Will it? He doesn’t know what the issue is, or if there is an issue at all. Maybe Ford has gone mad, huddled away in his books and research deep in the dense wood, in the shack with bloody windows.

Ford shudders at his voice, before relaxing, sinking back into sleep.

The clouds roll over, daylight stripping away the dark to grey murk, and Stanley shakes himself awake.

Stanford’s watch reads 7:30.

Right.

* * *

There is nothing but tinned meat and eggs. The bread is stale so Stanley toasts it and scraps the mould off the margarine. The kitchen is the cleanest room in the house, as it is evidently the most unused. Stanley creaks open the door with his shoulder, a tray in his hands. Two fried omelettes and a cup of coffee so strong you could stand your spoon in it.

Ford is awake, his head turned toward the window, snowfall a shadow on his face.

“Ford?”

“What happened?” His brother’s voice sounds so small. “What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything,” Stanley puts the tray in front of him. “But what you’re gonna do now is eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Bullshit.”

He could see the retort coming, the flick of Stanford’s tongue in his mouth, before he shrinks beneath Stanley’s glare. Slowly, slowly, with a rambling sigh, he pokes the omelette and starts to eat.

It’s tedious, at first, as if Ford is reteaching himself. Stanley is sat beside the boiler, watching the latest in Ford live. Before long, the true depth of Ford’s hunger kicks in and clears his plate in one. He grabs the coffee and downs it, spilling it down his front and staining his shirt, burning himself in the process.

“Easy, Sixer!” Stanley is up again, Ford’s wrists in his hands. The butter knife is held so tight by Ford he can see the white strain of his knuckles, and by the look in Sixer’s eyes, it seems to be drifting all too near to his throat. “Take it slow. You’re gonna make yourself ill.”

“I don’t need you to baby me, Stanley,” he hisses, although his eyes shimmer. “I’ll have you know I- I have been on my own for a l-long time, a-and…”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a big boy now,” Stanley forces his hands by his sides. “But if ya gonna eat like a kid, how else am I gonna treat ya?”

The irony isn’t lost on Ford - poor homeless Stanley, family screw up, commenting on shit like eating habits - but his brother just grumbles, too exhausted by god knows what to argue.

“Don’t talk to me like that, Stanley,” he says, but it's quiet, defeated. Stanley feels a rare shot of triumph as Ford finishes his breakfast - and most of Stanley’s to boot.

* * *

The days become slow weeks. Ford is non-communicative, sleeping and sobbing half of the time, waking Stanley in the dark with shrieks that could be laughter or screams. It’s fucked up, Stanley knows that much, but pine house of horrors it might be, there’s a warm bed and food and somebody who needs him for once.

Even if his sleep is disturbed.

It’s just the two of them, in the house, at night. The nights are the worst. Stanley thinks mental health is a buzz word that people use for kicks and free sympathy. But his brother, oh no. If this is madness, disturbed sleep and tinned meat omelettes, then Stanley can see why it would turn his brother nuts. Stanford couldn’t sit still when they were kids. Neither could Stanley, but he needed to be moving or punching something or slopping paint on himself. Stanford, well, Stanford needed to be thinking, inventing, mapping out another adventure in his head. They wouldn’t sleep for days on end, planning out treasure hunts and mystery solving. Their adventures were all the escapes they had. Now, in the close quarters of the pine house, they can’t escape each other.

It’s pathetic, but Stanley doesn’t hate it much as he should.

For the first time in ten years, Stanford needs Stanley. As much as he still hates him - and Stanley can pick up on that dislike oh so easy, the scrunched glares and the low tug at the side of his mouth - but Stanford calls for Stanley when the nightmares or waking dreams or whatever the fuck he sees in the shadows came too much to life.

The surrounding woods groan in the winter winds, seeming all too close and too far away. Stanford spends days pattering around like a ghost, his mind too gone and his body too wretched to bring himself to show Stanley the unbelievable thing, whatever it is, if it ever existed at all.

Stanley finds a television in the backrooms, much to his joy, a joy his brother Stanford can’t understand. Stanford has a television lying around, that he can afford to buy and also afford not to use! Stanley spends the afternoon fixing it up, securing the cables, and soon there is sound and light on at all hours.

“Must you watch that garbage, Stanley?” Ford is at the lounge door, his duvet wrapped around him. His hair is mussed, his glasses missing, but he is wearing the blue pyjamas Stanley had insisted on to replace the mad professor suit (it was crumpled, stale and stank. Stanley had said he’d looked like a creepy school teacher from a bad porno. You would know, was the acidic reply.)

“The problem with you, poindexter,” Stanley speaks through a mouth of potato crisps. “ Is that you don’t shut yer mind off for one second. No wonder you’re gaga.”

“Shut it, Stanley!” Ford huddles further into the blankets. “You don’t know the half of it! I have to keep awake, to keep up and aware or else…”

“Or else what?” Stanley hasn’t taken his eyes off the television, but his voice is hard as Brighton Rock and he wonders if he sounds like his Dad, because Stanford shuts his mouth all too quick.

“Never mind,” is the reply. “It…It doesn’t…”

Stanley doesn’t move, just takes another handful of crisps, and crunches too loud. Ford hovers by the door.

The light of the television is disturbed by a shifting shape, and there is Stanford, shuffling toward him, the strobing glow lining the shadows under his eyes.

Stanley looks up at him, grim.

The couch creaks. Ford tucks his chin on his knees, pulling himself in so close he could be folding away like a beach chair, still hidden in his duvet. Even if Stanley got the boiler going, it is still cold in the house.

The television drones on, canned laughter and high voices, but Stanley isn’t watching. He’s all too aware of Ford, like a twin shaped pin pressing tight into his skin.

Minutes passes.

“I’m sorry, Stanley,” cames a stiff, smothered whisper. Stanley doesn’t do anything, just watches the bright fuzzy shapes leap and swell. “I’m sorry I brought you here.”

The fact that being here means he is safe from hunger and thugs, well, goes to show how little Ford knows him, but he can appreciate the sentiment, sure.

Ford sighs, a rattling whoosh of air, and leans absently against Stan’s shoulder.

The gameshow goes to commercial. Stanley glares at the ugly overbright advertisements, smiling idiots in cheap suits with even cheaper products.

And then, like that, as if nothing has changed, Ford’s head slips and lands, gentle, on Stanley’s stomach and his brother is asleep, curled tight on the couch, like they were teens again, and Stanley, Stanley feels a wrench.

It’s a kind of happiness, well, it should be, but it is too hugged to his heart to be comfortable. It’s beautiful and horrible and he hates it, hates how he can be reduced to this by nothing but the weight of his brother and how he loves it too, loves loves loves Ford like nothing before and no-one since.

He sits like that for hours, until the shows became bleak late-night television but he won’t move, won’t breathe for this moment, as Ford snores light and easy against his heart.

Well, his gut. Ford is sinewy and underfed, the lanky teen from Glass Beach now a thin and stretched out man, but Stanley was always big, always broad and barrel-chested. Starving he might have been, back in his dead-end flat, but poor diet and poorer choices had filled out his body without the youthful glow to charm it up. He always had a belly, sneaked beers and toffee peanuts doing little to help, but since he left home and boxed and cheated and stole his way to glory, street fighting and a good swing with a baseball bat had made him hard. His belly was muscule, he reasoned to himself, like bodybuilders built like lorry men, but it wasn’t soft. No part of him was soft. But Ford still slept on him, as if he still retained his boyish puppy fat.

Stanley wakes the next morning, breakfast news blaring on the telly, his bladder straining against his jeans and Ford nowhere to be seen.

* * *

Stanley can’t find Ford. He searches the top and bottom rooms, even the attic. But no Ford. The catch is undisturbed on the front door, and his coat is still there.

He does the old brotherly thing.

“Ford!” He bellows. Nothing. Hah, typical. “Sixer, where the fuck are you?”

There is a return of empty silence. But Stanley knows these silences. It’s a loaded, _lala not listening_ silence. The phantom warmth of his brother on his chest isn’t going to make him sentimental now.

He looks around. Gizmos fizz and crackle. He knows not one iota what these things do, but he knows what his brother will and will not do.

“Hey, Poindexter!” He flicks one of the aerials with a sharp twang. Loud enough, and he knows Ford heard it. “What’s with all this crap? I’m gonna start loading it up and putting it outside in the garbage. That ok with you?”

Silence.

Stanley twangs it once, twice, thrice.

Silence.

“Okay then!” Stanley yells. “I’ll take your silence as yes, definitely, absolutely.”

He barely scrapes a heavy box (that he knows will make a good, hard sound) before he hears footsteps hurrying beneath him (the damn shack has a basement, of course) before his brother emerges, breathing hard, face frantic.

“For God’s sake, Stanley!” He hisses. “Can’t I get a moment’s peace?”

“What you need is rest,” Stanley drops the box. Ford jumps, swearing. “And where the hell were you, anyway? Got a secret lab down there, Poindexter?”

“It’s a basement, Stanley,” Ford crosses his arms. “Every house has a basement.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He’ll find it later. Whatever impossible thing Ford is hiding, it’ll be down there, he’s sure of it, but right now it can wait. “We’re out of food.”

“We’re?” Ford narrows his eyes. “I’m not out of anything.”

“Out of sense, more like. You need to eat. I need to eat.”

“We have eggs.”

“All gone.”

“The tinned meat?”

“That too.”

“And you expect me to pay for it?”

Stanley just stares at him.

Stanford pauses, chewing over the insensitivity of his comment, before sucking in his cheeks.

“Fine!” He snarls. He marches to a small cupboard under his table, leans down and fishes out an obscenely stuffed wallet. Stanley feels a prickle along his neck at the sight of the fat dollar bills. “Go out, but don’t go crazy.”

“Can I buy some new clothes, Sixer?”

Ford snaps his head up.

“What?”

Stanley gestures to himself.

“All I’ve got is this stinkin’ t-shirt and busted jeans. And the coat I shoplifted from a yard sale.”

“Can’t you wear my clothes?”

“C’mon, Sixer. We’ve not worn the same stuff since we were seven. And do I look like I could wear your weedy nerd wear?”

The insult hides the hurt. Ford huffs and shrugs.

“Fine. But don’t be gone too long.”

* * *

At the local clothes mart, he buys trucker jeans, t-shirts, jumpers. Heavyset numbers for heavy set men like him. He’d forgotten what something new felt like between his fingers. He pays - actually pays, for once! - and goes to the local convenience store for food.

Bread, eggs, tinned meat. No tv dinners, no half-eaten takeaway stolen from fast food tables. The bags feel heavy when he walks back, satisfying in their bulk, and he feels content. Life is slow out here, but he likes it. All he wanted was a slow life with his brother. Maybe now, even as sick as Ford is, they can manage.

Even if Ford tries to send him away, Stanley won’t go.

Will Ford try to send him away?

No. No, he wouldn’t. Not again.

Right?

The light fades through the trees. Stanley puts down the bags, stretches out his back with a long yawn.

Teeth tear through his left arm, shedding fabric and flesh. Ice and slush hikes up his back as he is thrown on his front, and he sees it - one single eye, burning like Glass Beach Sun - and teeth, so many teeth, serrated like sharks, gouge into his chest and pull.

Stanley yells. His body is down, but his hands are free. He grabbles at the thick neck, hearing the snarl oh so close to his ear, so close to his neck - and he lifts his right fist, and with a great swing, punches the thing with such force he feels bones cave.

There is a whimper. The weight leaves him. Stanley, blood in his eyes, white-hot agony making the world fuzz and blink, rolls onto his side. He waits. He waits for the end.

Behind him, comes a howl, a howl that sounds like a scream. The leaves rustle and the snow cracks as paws trek through it, along and away.

Silence.

Stanley lies there. The blood makes red cobwebs in the snow.

Slowly, slowly, he gets to his feet. The bags are untouched. He picks them up. His legs shake, but he is steady.

On his chest and arm, the wounds are already beginning to close.


End file.
